Capture data for business questions

To answer one of the following business questions, select the relevant classes in the Class field and click Update to access the class and the data capture needed to collect the data for the class.

If your initial focus is on managing the application portfolio, capture data for the following business questions:

The business question Who is responsible for our assets? enables your company to understand the users and organizations that have a functional role for the objects in the IT portfolio. In Alfabet FastLane, responsibilities are documented via the concept of "roles". A role is the functional responsibility that a person or organization has for an object. This information is critical to close the gaps in your data and require the relevant users to correct data quality issues.

The data capture template for this business question supports you to collect the data required to define the functional roles fulfilled by persons or organizations. Each role is based on a configured role type.

* Person: The class Organization can alternatively be specified for a role. ** Application: Any other class representing IT assets (such as Component, Business Capability, Vendor, etc.) can be specified with a role.

Alfabet FastLane provides predefined role types but you can configure additional role types if necessary. Depending on your company's methodology, you can have role types that are used for roles fulfilled by persons or organizations or both persons and organizations. Before you import the data, configure any other role types that are required in your IT portfolio. Roles can be based on the following predefined role types that are fulfilled by users (class Person):

The following predefined role types can be assigned to organizations:

Data capture for business question Who is responsible for our assets?:

Object Class Comments
Person This class represents users. Users may already be added via the user management capability. Users only need to be imported for this business question if users are responsible for IT assets in your company. The XLSX file includes rows for all existing users in the database and columns for the relevant attributes for users such as name, email, etc.
Organization Organizations only need to be imported for this business question if organizations are responsible for IT assets in your company.
Application

XLSX file exports all applications in database to rows and includes columns with all role types relevant for the class Application.

  • To specify a role for existing applications, define the person or organization to fulfill a specific role type and set the Operation column to Update.
  • To create a new application and specify roles, add a new row for the application, define mandatory attributes like Name. Specify the person or organization to fulfill a specific role type. Set Operation to New.
Component

XLSX file exports all components in database to rows and includes columns with all role types relevant for the class Component.

  • To specify a role for existing components, define the person or organization to fulfill a specific role type and set the Operation column to Update.
  • To create a new component and specify roles, define the component in an empty row and define mandatory attributes like Name. Specify the person or organization to fulfill a specific role type. Set Operation to New.

The business question What is our application portfolio? is the most comprehensive and ensures a single-source of truth about your application portfolio. If you capture the data required for this business question, you will essentially import enough data to use most analytics focused on your application, business, and technology portfolios. Capture the data required for this business question to document a master list of all applications, their attributes, and their relationships to other aspects of the enterprise architecture. A data completion score provides up-to-date information about the quality of your repository.

Data Requirements: > Business Capability > Vendor > Physical Server > Virtual Server > Component > User > Organization > Business Process > Business Data > Application Group > Application > Information Flow

The business question What should we be focusing on? identifies the business capabilities, their business relevance, and the number of applications associated with the business capabilities in the as-is and to-be landscapes. Analytics help you understand whether to invest, migrate, or divest in applications based on the relevance of the business capabilities they support.

Data Requirements: Business Capability > Application

The business question What is our landscape? provides insights to the business capabilities, their dependencies, and the applications providing functional support to the business capabilities.

Data Requirements: Business Capability > Application

The business question How will IT failure impact our business provides you with a high-level end-to-end view of your IT technology landscape in order to understand the suseptibility of locations and servers to IT failure as well as the applications and the business capabilities that are at risk.

Data Requirements: Location > Business Capability > Physical Server > Virtual Server > Application understand the susceptibility of locations and servers to IT failure as well as the applications and the business capabilities that are at risk.Data Requirements: Location > Business Capability > Physical Server > Virtual Server > Application

The business question What are our technology standards? focuses on the standard components that shall be proposed for the IT infrastructure.

The business question What are our cloud focus areas? provides top-down portfolio analysis for cloud migration in order to understand the applications that are best suited for migration based on cloud relevance and cloud readiness indicators.

.Data Requirements: Business Capability > Organization > Servers > Component > Application Group > Application > Information Flow

The business question What is our roadmap? provides an overview of the application roadmap and allows you to understand lifecycles of the applications including when they will be implemented or reach end-of-life.

The business question What is our cloud migration strategy supports the planning of a migration strategy for each application in your cloud portfolio based on an understanding of the impact of migration to business capabilities and the IT ecosystem.

Data Requirements: Business Capability > Application Group > Application

The business question Who are our vendors? offers insight about your vendors and how they impact the components, supported business capabilities, and applications relevant to your IT portfolio.Data Requirements: Business Capability > Vendor > Component > Application

The business question What is our technical debt? allows you to understand the dependence of your applications on technical components based on component and application lifecycles so that you can act on your technical debt before the application or component goes out of service.

Data Requirements: Component > Application